Cookbooks offer a unique and valuable way to examine American life. Their lessons, however, are not always obvious. Direct references to the American Civil War were rare in cookbooks, even in those published right in the middle of it. In part, this is a reminder that lives went on and that dinner still appeared on most tables most nights, no matter how much the world was changing outside. But people accustomed to thinking of cookbooks as a source for recipes, and not much else, can be surprised by how much information they can reveal about the daily lives and ways of thinking of the people who wrote and used them. In this fascinating historical compilation, excerpts from five Civil War–era cookbooks present a compelling portrait of cooking and eating in the urban north of the 1860s United States.

Includes index.

Feeding the North / by Kelly J. Sisson Lessens and Adam Arenson -- Seeing the Civil War era through its cookbooks: Mary Hooker Cornelius, The young housekeeper's friend (Boston : Taggard & Thompson, 1863); Mrs. S.G. Knight, Tit-bits, or, How to prepare a nice dish at a moderate expense (Boston : Crosby and Nichols, 1864); P.K.S., What to do with the cold mutton : a book of réchauffés, together with many other approved receipts for the kitchen of a gentleman of moderate income (New York : Bunce and Huntington, Publishers, 1865); Ann Howe, The American kitchen directory and housewife (Cincinnati : howe's Subscription Book Concern, 1868); What shall we eat? A manual for housekeepers, comprising a bill of fare for breakfast, dinner, and tea, for every day in the year (New York : G.P. Putnam & Son, 1868) -- Glossary of nineteenth-century cooking terms.